Conspiracy of Silence: Triple Exposure
by Nomad1
Summary: Severus Snape's third year at Hogwarts. Even the most closely-guarded secrets have a way of slipping out...
1. Chapter One

** Conspiracy of Silence **

by Nomad   
Dec 2001

**Disclaimer: ** J.K. Rowling created and owns Hogwarts, Severus Snape, and almost everything else in this story - for which I will be forever jealous.   
**Author's Note**: The sequel to CoS: Second Sight.

**Triple Exposure**

The crowd on platform nine and three-quarters was markedly smaller than usual. Those that were there tended to be older; there was a definite scarcity of first years around the place. Those that were there were as nervous and excited as could be expected, but many of the older students seemed subdued.

A marked contrast to the dark atmosphere was the feline grin on the face of Lucius Malfoy. But then, he had no reason to be touched by the general depression - not when he was the cause of at least part of it.

Things had slowly been going bad in the wizarding world for a while now. Disappearances, random attacks, a rise in anti-Muggle sentiments. But at the end of last year, the first signs had appeared that even Hogwarts itself was not totally immune.

The murder of astronomy teacher Auriga Cephus could not be tied to Malfoy - at least not directly, although he probably heartily approved of it. Or would, if he knew it was a murder. That was a fact that was currently known only to Dumbledore, Snape, the Ministry of Magic, and a twelve-year-old called Lewis Matthews.

Lewis Matthews, and his older brother Josh, were the other cause of the aura of darkness and distrust that had settled over school. And that, Malfoy _could_ be held accountable for.

When Lewis had been sorted into Gryffindor house, his Slytherin brother Josh had borne the brunt of Malfoy's wrath. This had grown into a private vendetta, splitting the Slytherin house into those who favoured Malfoy, and those who were just too afraid to go against him.

Things had culminated with a magical attack that had put Josh in a coma for several days. His parents had taken him and his brother out of the school, but Josh had never named his attackers and only the other Slytherin boys from his year knew the truth.

Malfoy had been devious in diverting suspicion. Whilst all of them knew he was responsible, even those who knew couldn't have proved it. The only ones he'd let in on the secret were those he sent to actually perform the curse; Nick Avery and Simon Lestrange.

Even Sev, whom Malfoy trusted, had been cut out of the loop. Malfoy was quick enough assessing people to know that his cool attitude was better suited to deviousness than dirty-work. Further, by having Josh left unconscious in the library, he had practically guaranteed that the studious and solitary Snape would be the one to find him. He was the perfect choice; a Slytherin, for the sympathy value, but one who was cool and unreadable, and wouldn't crack under the headmaster's sharp gaze.

Yes, Malfoy was extremely devious. His fellow Slytherins might be split between fearing and worshipping him, but none of them underestimated him; the same could not be said for the rest of the school. The Gryffindors, in particular, regarded him as something like a pantomime baddie - sneering and snapping, but unable to do any real damage.

Sev, working on the inside, saw a rather different story.

Malfoy had the patronage of some mysterious but powerful figure, who could teach him curses no boy of his age should be able to master. Sev strongly suspected that this dark wizard had some sort of affiliation with the 'Death Eaters', the group who had claimed credit for Auriga Cephus's murder.

Sev believed he had as much of Malfoy's trust as anybody - but even that was not a lot. Malfoy was the kind of boy who greatly enjoyed having a secret, especially one that gave him power over others. He knew Sev was extremely smart, and would be wary about cutting him in - Lucius, no doubt, was worried about being eclipsed in his new master's eyes.

"Ah, Severus," said Malfoy pleasantly. "Looking forward to the new year?"

"I'm sure it's likely to be... exciting," he said, dryly. Malfoy barked a brief laugh - perhaps at the dark insinuations, or perhaps simply at the image of dry-as-dust Severus Snape getting excited over anything.

He put a casual arm over Sev's shoulder, which he avoided the urge to throw off. Sev was not at all a tactile person, and he certainly didn't like being touched by Lucius Malfoy. "I can guarantee it," Malfoy grinned, close to his ear, and then pulled away from him.

On the train-ride, they were joined by Nick, Simon, and Colin Crabbe. Over the last two years, they had become Malfoy's constant companions, although they couldn't be called 'friends'. No, they were more like a military escort; Crabbe as the dull-witted muscle-man, and Nick and Simon to do the dirty work so Malfoy kept his hands clean. For reasons of deniability only - Malfoy certainly didn't steer clear of nastiness because he didn't enjoy it. However, he was smart enough to farm out anything that brought with it a chance of being caught in the act.

Sev knew where he fit into this little gang; the extremely dangerous position of senior advisor. He had to tread the fine line between proving his brains valuable to Malfoy, and being so far in advance of him that Malfoy started to feel threatened.

Back at Hogwarts, they slid into their places at the by-now familiar house table. Malfoy seemed to be regarding the students to be sorted with more than his usual contemptuous disinterest.

Sev ran an assessing eye over the ragtag assortment in evidence. There were only perhaps forty new first years, making for a year-group half the size of his own. The tables also had some empty places; mostly in Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff. Brave Gryffindors and ambitious Slytherins thrived on a more dangerous climate. Most of them, anyway.

The split in their own year group was all the more apparent. He, Malfoy, and Malfoy's three hand-picked 'soldiers' sat on one side of the table; the other four boys, Jack, Stuart, Robert and John, sat on the other. They were all fairly quiet, and spent most of their time looking at their plates or at the ceiling.

The Sorting Hat sang its usual carefully-composed piece of doggerel, causing Malfoy to roll his eyes pointedly. But once it had finished, he leaned forward in his seat to watch the Sorting.

Sev watched with him, and also watched Malfoy's face for cues. A few minutes and a little knowledge of Malfoy made it crystal clear.

Malfoy was scanning the new intake for mudbloods. Technically, there should be no way to tell, but of course to them all magic was completely novel and astonishing. Any wizardborn kid might be intimidated by the sheer scale of Hogwarts, but those from Muggle families were similarly shocked by things like magically appearing feasts and the school ghosts.

When a slow smile began to curl over Malfoy's features towards the end of the Sorting, he knew why. "We seem to have been exceptionally... lucky, this year," he observed neutrally. There were as many Muggle-born students as ever... but not one of them had been Sorted into house Slytherin.

"Lucky?" Lucius smirked. "Hardly. Things are changing, Severus. It's so obvious, even a singing hat knows it." His smile darkened. "Of course, it figures that the lesser houses would be slower to take on the changes."

He glanced up and down the Slytherin table, and then turned back to Sev. "House Slytherin is as close as it's ever been to perfection. And by the end of this year, the last of these... impurities will have been cleansed." He smiled, and rubbed absently at the dark metal ring on his left hand. Sev had noticed it earlier; it was in the shape of a twisting snake, and had leapt out at him because Malfoy was not normally one for jewellery.

"Why do you have that?" he asked, automatically lowering his voice. It was clearly the right time for conspiratorial tones, for Malfoy replied just as quietly.

"It's a mark of favour," he said with a self-satisfied grin. "I'll tell you more when we get back to our rooms."

At the lead table, Professor Dumbledore stood up. "Ahem. Welcome back, all... and welcome for the first time to our new students. As I'm sure you're aware, things have been somewhat... tense in the wizarding world of late. However, I want to assure you that the grounds of Hogwarts are as well protected as ever." He nodded to the teachers on his right and left.

"Professors Malachite and Fractalis have been renewing the wards on the outer gates, and Professor Vitae has lent her assistance with some extremely powerful charms. In these troubled times, we are safest when we stick together; and at Hogwarts, we are all one family."

Sev looked at Malfoy and pointedly raised an eyebrow, causing the other boy to snicker. At least Dumbledore hadn't tried to say they were a 'happy' family.

"The staff, most of you will know by now," Dumbledore said. "Professor Salubrius here will now be taking over the first- and second-year Astronomy classes, and Professor Cuero will take up his old position as the Care of Magical Creatures tutor." There was polite applause as the older students craned their necks to see the new teacher.

He was a narrow-faced man with reddish hair, a moustache and a snooty expression. He was looking at most of the students with the kind of contempt Malfoy reserved for them, although his face seemed to soften a little when he glanced towards the Slytherins.

Care of Magical Creatures was one of the new subjects available in the third year. Sev had signed up for that, and Arithmancy with Fractalis. He had picked his lessons on the basis that Malfoy had also chosen them; it really mattered little which he chose, for he could excel at any without effort.

When the feasting was over, everybody stumbled back to their dorms. Hogwarts rooms were assigned on a rotating basis, so that a year-group kept the same places all through school, instead of shifting all the time. Sev returned to what was now Third Year Dorm B and took up his usual bed. When Stuart Flint tried to do the same, however, he was stopped.

"My bed now," said Simon Lestrange placidly. Simon was always very softly-spoken, and slow to speak or move. However, his was not a natural quietness like Snape's; his was the silence of a clock gently ticking down to zero. Simon Lestrange was the closest thing Hogwarts had to a psychopath, and they had all learned to tread around him very carefully.

"Okay..." Stuart slowly withdrew the suitcase he'd automatically thrown down. Something about the far-away look in Simon's eyes encouraged you not to use sudden movements. "Um... this used to be my bed." He was careful to make it sound half-questioning, and not in any way accusing.

"Mine now," repeated Simon with a vague smile.

"Fine." He retreated rapidly. "I'll, um, I'll go move in with Jack and Rob and Johnny, how about that?" Simon continued to smile at him in that slightly bemused way, as if he was undecided as to whether Stuart really existed or he was just imagining him. Stuart took the hint, and scuttled away.

Malfoy and Avery cackled in the wake of his departure. Sev smiled thinly, because it was wise to be amused by the same things as Lucius Malfoy. Slow-witted Colin didn't have time to work out the funny before the others had stopped laughing.

Malfoy got to his feet, and surveyed his troops approvingly. "At last; the company of real Slytherins." He smiled, and padded over to close the door. Then he stood with his back against it, and smiled again.

"You have all been loyal to me, and loyal to my cause. Don't think it has gone unnoticed. Those we work for reward loyalty... and brutally punish traitors." He shot a pointed glance behind him, as if he could see through the door to the place where he had once used a forbidden curse on Joshua Matthews.

Avery and Colin listened with puppy-dog devotion - Simon with a variant on his usual detached gaze. Sev's face was blank as ever, although behind it he was cynically amused by this classical cult brainwashing.

"Soon... soon, I will be admitted to the inner circles - and you will quickly follow." He reached into his pocket for something. "Until then, I would give you these tokens of allegiance." He opened his hand, and in it lay four more dark metal rings like his own.

Sev accepted one from Malfoy, and studied it carefully. The metal was almost black, and polished to a fine shine. The ring was in the shape of a coiled snake, with its jaws open in a wide hiss. Within the jaws of the snake was a miniature skull.

Skulls and snakes... the symbols of the Death Eaters.

Sev slipped the ring onto the fourth finger of his left hand, the way Malfoy wore his. To display it proudly could be very useful; if there were other groups of followers like the one Malfoy was building, they would see him as one of their own.

Malfoy smirked triumphantly at them. "Soon," he assured. "Very, very soon."

* * *

Sev's first new lesson this year was Care of Magical Creatures. They dutifully trooped out to the school field where Professor Cuero waited for them. Hogwarts, magical or not, was not immune to the English rain, and the ground was damp and soggy underfoot.

Malfoy protested loudly about what the mud was doing to his expensive new robes, but that was nothing on the way he cursed when he saw their partners for this subject. "Gryffindors!" He sounded disgusted. "Will we never be rid of them?"

"Unfortunately for us, doesn't look like it," snapped Sirius Black. He scowled at Malfoy, who gave him a mocking smile in return.

"Love your new hair, Black. What did you cut it with, a penknife?" Sirius just sneered, but a few moments later Sev caught him surreptitiously trying to smooth his unruly curls into place.

Sev's own hair was also black and shoulder-length, but it hung perfectly straight and had a tendency to appear greasy. There were few things in this world Sev could have cared less about than his own physical appearance. In his experience, people who spent a lot of time working on their surface appearance did so because there was nothing worth knowing about underneath.

Professor Cuero regarded his new students with a sneer to rival Malfoy's. "Third years. Yes." He pronounced it much the way he might have said 'flobberworms'.

For their first lesson, they were dealing with a herd of odd, crossbreed creatures called leucrocottas. About the size of a small donkey, they were vaguely feline but with cloven hooves. Their strangest feature was the fact that instead of separate teeth, they had one huge flat slab of bone. They were kept in an enclosure, which was as well - they moved extremely rapidly, and could be sparked to flee with little warning.

Working with an air of absolute disinterest, Cuero explained how the creatures could mimic human speech, and how they could be lured close without sparking them to flight. He was casually dismissive of most of the students, and to Malfoy's delight extra-nasty to the Gryffindors. He was especially biting towards Lily and Jade - perhaps because they were girls, but Sev thought it more likely to be because they were both 'mudbloods'. Interesting; a teacher who shared Malfoy's prejudices. He was intrigued - it didn't seem like Dumbledore to miss such open enmity in one of his chosen staff. But where Dumbledore was seemingly as sharp as Sev himself, he suffered from one fatal flaw... he wanted to trust people.

That was one mistake Sev wasn't intending to make.

Several times in the lesson, Lily tried to catch his eye. He studiously avoided her gaze. At the end of last year, he had secretly slipped her an invisibility cloak that had once been his. Of course she knew who the gift was from, but he didn't intend to speak with her about it. He had a suspicion that she would take his gesture as proof that he too could sometimes be moved by emotion or compassion, which of course it wasn't.

She was a mudblood, and therefore in more danger than him. She was also one of the only two people who knew his real mission in getting close to Malfoy. He couldn't afford for her to be placed in a position where she might accidentally reveal his secret. Therefore, it was logical to protect her.

Pure logic. But of course, people who saw the world through emotional eyes refused to accept that you could live without doing so.

Sev's ever-observant brain picked out another Gryffindor who was earning Cuero's disgust. Remus Lupin; a quiet, thoughtful boy whose robes were always ragged and threadbare. Since Lupin was neither a mudblood nor a girl, and not particularly objectionable, Sev watched with interest to see why Cuero had taken against him.

He soon saw that in Lupin's case, the teacher had a genuine beef. He appeared be trying in earnest, but he just couldn't make the leucrocottas obey him. No matter what he did, the beasts just wouldn't go near him.

Sev was intrigued. Animals, especially the magical kind, had senses at their disposal that humans did not. What was it about Remus Lupin that they were so afraid of?


	2. Chapter Two

A few days passed, and Malfoy had said nothing more about the snake rings or his mysterious benefactor. Finally, late one night, Sev said in just the right tone of impatient nervousness "Lucius, don't you think we're moving a little slowly? We're just sitting around. We should be _doing_ something."

Malfoy gave a wide smile. "I'm glad you said that, Severus. Everybody, listen up." The other three scrambled into varying states of attention-paying.

"Sev says we're moving too slowly here, and he's right. We've suffered under this outdated system long enough-" Sev attempted to figure out how you could twist the current situation into 'suffering', and even with his exceptional brain couldn't quite do it - "and it's time for a change. Now, we all know it's coming... but even so, we should do our bit."

He smiled reflectively, and fiddled absently with his wand. "Now, last year... last year was a trial run. This year, we're gonna get a little more... ambitious." They all nodded and smiled; after all, weren't they all Slytherins? "Last year, we cleaned the trash out of our year-group. This year, it's time to purify the rest of house Slytherin."

"Next year the school, when we're fifteen the world?" suggested Snape wryly.

Malfoy smiled darkly at him. "Oh, it's not as outlandish as you might think..." he intimated softly.

"What can we do?" asked Avery, with oily eagerness.

"Well, it's not so much a question of what _you_ can do as... what Severus can do." He smirked at the other boy encouragingly.

The correct response to that would probably be a 'Me? What can _I_ do?' - but that was neither a Slytherin response nor a Snape response. He simply raised a fine eyebrow and waited for Malfoy to elaborate.

Malfoy turned to address the whole group. "I don't know if you've noticed, but we have a _genius_ in our midst." He placed an odd accent on the word 'genius', as if he couldn't quite decide if it should be mocking or not.

Slytherins might be ambitious, but - with the possible exception of Colin Crabbe - none of them were stupid. They had all twigged by now that Sev's brains were really something quite extraordinary. Malfoy knew about the deal he had with Professor Malachite to be allowed to read up on all sorts of dangerous subjects, and they'd all seen him breezing through texts they couldn't understand a word of. Sev tried instinctively to disguise the true extent of his intelligence, but he had to read sometimes. He wasn't prepared to give up his books for any amount of protective illusion.

However, what Malfoy had in mind wasn't his usual quest for ever-more-nasty hexes. After what he'd done to Josh Matthews last year, Sev doubted he needed anything more powerful anyway.

"House Slytherin is, as you know, the home of deviousness." Malfoy managed to make that sound like something to be proud of. Sev noticed that he seemed to have developed a need to make dramatic speeches; probably a manifestation of his newly puffed sense of importance. Lucius Malfoy had always loved the sound of his own voice. "Well, I think we all know that our Severus Snape is more devious than most."

_More devious than you know._ If he'd been James Potter or Sirius Black, he'd have said that out loud; the hero, making a cryptic comment so the bad guys could remember it at the time of their downfall and curse not having twigged.

Being Severus Snape, he smiled thinly and said nothing. Other people's opinions had never meant enough to him to want to show off.

Malfoy clapped him companionably on the shoulder in a way that Snape detested. "Well, Severus, this year we're finally going to put that brain of yours to good use." Sev suspected Lucius Malfoy's definition of good did not quite run parallel with most people's. "Sev, we need a plan," he said.

Severus quirked an eyebrow. "Anything specific in mind, or just a plan?"

Malfoy laughed, and squeezed his shoulder in a friendly way. What was all this need for physical contact? Sev couldn't see how people got any kind of comfort or validation out of it. It was an invasion of his personal space, and he found it extremely distasteful.

Malfoy's smile faded into seriousness, and he produced a small slip of paper from inside one of his textbooks. There were three names on it; Snape recognised them all. All Slytherins, and all... "Mudbloods?"

Malfoy nodded briskly. "I want them out. I want them out soon, and I want them out without anybody knowing why, how, or who got rid of them. Can you do it?"

There was only one possible response to that.

"Of course."

* * *

Malfoy was, as Sev had long known, far from stupid. He had been able to get away with his victimisation of Josh Matthews last year because it was an isolated incident, seemingly reasonless. Ejecting the last three mudbloods in house Slytherin in quick succession was a very different proposition.

Sev was someone who lived by spotting patterns - and however this was done, it would make a pattern. The only way to make it work would be to create a pattern that nobody less sharp than him could trace.

One thing that actually counted to his advantage was the general _lack_ of prejudice against mudbloods. People other than Malfoy's little cadre simply didn't care, and probably wouldn't even know who came from a Muggle family and who didn't. So the trick would be to get them all out of the school for entirely unconnected reasons.

Sev felt no moral qualms about conspiring to remove three completely innocent students from the only magical academy they could reasonably attend. If they stayed at Hogwarts, things would only go very badly for them. At least if he was planning this operation, he could control how badly burned they got from it.

It took no time at all to select his first victim; the oldest, a sixth year called Darren Kaye. If anyone began to suspect a pattern, they would automatically look to the sixth and seventh years; no one would expect students their age to be victimising someone so much older.

Sev dredged his memory for anything pertaining to Darren Kaye, and then spent a few weeks surreptitiously observing him. He was, despite his Muggle ancestry, a typical Slytherin. Sly in a dully unpleasant way, he would cheat or lie whenever he could get away with it, and he had the kind of friends who would happily cackle with him over others' misfortune, and just as happily ditch him once he had some of his own.

Sev's plan grew and solidified in his mind very quickly. Had he still had his invisibility cloak, he could have set it in motion himself... but for this, he had not just his own resources but people under command. He found himself in the unusual position of needing a favour from Colin Crabbe.

"Colin, I need you to do something for me. I need you to steal some things."

Colin grinned proudly. For a boy of his bulk, he was surprisingly light-fingered. All sorts of minor valuables had a tendency to wander into his possession, although he had learned quickly not to mess with anything belonging to his dorm-mates.

"Sure, Severus. D'you want me to get you some stuff from the staff offices? I know a way to get in."

Sev shook his head impatiently. "No, nothing like that. I just want you to go up to the sixth-year dorms every so often, and lift a few things. Spare quills, sweets, magical gadgets, any spare knuts and sickles that have been left lying around."

A frown made its way ponderously across Colin's flattened features. "But that's just small stuff. I take stuff like that all the time."

Sev permitted himself a tight-lipped smile. "Exactly." As Colin shrugged and dutifully turned to go, he called him back. "Oh, and one more thing. There's a bed in the second dorm with a poster of a dragon above it. Take things from all the other places, but not from that one."

Somewhat to his surprise, Crabbe performed his assigned tasks without any difficulty. Sev allowed him to keep the sweets and the money he picked up, but anything fairly expensive or easily recognisable he hoarded under his bed, in the compartment where he had once hidden the invisibility cloak.

Crabbe's well-honed thieving instincts let him know how much to take and how frequently he could get away with it. At Sev's urging, he would pick pockets and bags of the sixth-years in the library or between classes - but only when a certain oblivious sixteen-year-old was in the area.

The sixth-years gradually became aware that there was a petty thief in their midst, but nothing was ever major enough to call in the staff. Many of the things Crabbe took should definitely not have been secreted about their dorms in the first place.

Perhaps people noticed Darren Kaye never had anything taken - perhaps they did not. But Sev knew that wouldn't matter. Whatever they saw or didn't see now, he knew they would have an entirely different recollection as soon as somebody was in the frame for it.

The frame he drew together very neatly. From the third year and upwards, Hogwarts students were allowed on set weekends to visit Hogsmeade, the nearby wizarding village. They had to have parental permission first, but that hadn't been a problem - he'd dropped the slip on top of a pile of his uncle's papers one day, and he had quite absently signed it.

Unlike his fellow students, Sev wasn't in the slightest bit interested in Zonko's joke shop, or the incredible variety of sweets in Honeydukes. More to the point, everyone else would expect that, too. He allowed himself to be seen briefly browsing Dervish and Banges, and then made his way over to the bookshop. Not only was he genuinely keen to expand his personal library, but the bookshop was directly opposite Honeydukes - the one place students were virtually guaranteed to end up within.

Crabbe and Avery stuck with him - this year, rules had been imposed about sticking in pairs or threes - looking bored. Neither of them being great readers, it didn't take much acting. Avery lounged by the window, watching the street outside. Finally, he sat up with a lazy stretch and said "God, this is boring. I'm going across to Honeydukes. Coming?"

Colin got up, but Sev said "I'll stay here," not looking up from his books.

To anybody watching, it was probably a fairly familiar scenario. And after all, there were only five people at Hogwarts who knew it had been carefully planned that way.

Sev was careful to _not_ watch them walk across, and doubly careful to pay zero attention to Darren Kaye and his friends where Avery had spotted them out of the window. He very much doubted anybody would ever try to link this to him in any way - but it was in his nature to be ridiculously over-cautious.

A more emotional person might have jiggled on the spot nervously, or been unable to avoid the occasional nervous flicker of a glance. Sev stood as still as ever, calmly flicking through a copy of _Olde and Forgotten Bewitchments and Charms_. He stayed that way until the commotion of the magical alarms was loud enough to disturb even the most devoted bookworm.

Honeydukes being a simple sweetshop, there were no crack teams of Aurors Apparating into position. However, half of the Hogwarts teaching staff came tumbling out of the Hog's Head, semi-drunk and more than semi-irritated.

Darren Kaye was unconscious on the pavement outside the shop. The magical theft detectors, in addition to shrieking as badly as any Howler, had dropped him with an automatic stun spell.

He was restored with a tap of Professor Vitae's wand, and then the shouting began. Darren was - justifiably - furious, complaining that the packs of Ice Mice and Acid Pops had not got into his pockets by any will of his own. The Professors were all too annoyed at being interrupted on their day off to listen.

Professor Malachite confiscated Darren's wand, and snapped sternly "Go back up the school and wait outside my office. Stay there until I get back."

Darren scowled, but the Professor was the head of house Slytherin, and there was no arguing. His gathered friends all made sympathetic faces as he stomped off. And then, once he was gone, they started crowding round Professor Malachite to tell him of all the little things that had been going missing.

Sev, for one, knew that they weren't missing any longer. In fact, as of five minutes after all of them but Simon Lestrange had headed down to Hogsmeade, they had been neatly stored in a compartment under Darren's bed.

* * *

Sev had no invisibility cloak to be a fly on the wall in Malachite's office, but he didn't need one. It was doubtful anybody in the entire building had missed Malachite's towering fury as it echoed off the walls. Stand in a nearby corridor, and you could hear phrases like "-disgrace to the school!" and "_never_ in all my years as a teacher-" flying through the air as he raised his voice in anger.

Professor Malachite, Sev happened to know, was extremely defensive of the Slytherin reputation. Knowing the way they were always cast as the 'evil' side in any given confrontation, he was fighting a losing battle to re-establish them in the eyes of the other houses. As soon as Darren had been caught, nobody had thought 'a Hogwarts student just got caught stealing'. Everyone had thought 'a Slytherin just got caught stealing'.

Malachite was, naturally, more than furious. He took Darren 'crimes' extremely personally, as Sev had expected him to. He was not prepared to listen to the sixth-year's increasingly angry protestations of innocence. And it certainly didn't help Darren's case when the other boys in his dorm took the opportunity to do an unofficial 'raid' and found the missing items stashed under his bed.

Getting expelled from Hogwarts was near to unheard of, and Sev didn't think petty theft of sweets and small change would do it. However, he also knew it didn't have to.

Mr. and Mrs. Kaye arrived the following morning (neither of them had been prepared to travel by Floo powder). They obviously knew little about magic, but they didn't need to have 'petty theft' spelt out to them. They were both as furious as Malachite, protesting their son's innocence.

Sev soon discovered that apparently being a Muggle was no guarantee of avoiding Slytherin arrogance. They refused to admit even the slightest possibility that their son had done anything wrong (admittedly he hadn't, but Sev was fairly sure it wasn't beyond him to have). After several hours of indiscriminate shouting, they stormed out with a sulky Darren in tow.

"I'll have nothing more to do with your damned magic!" Mr. Kaye shouted over his shoulder on the way out. "I said it before, I'll say it again - it's damned unnatural. I won't have you pinning this on my boy, just because _you're_ all so corrupt it wouldn't occur to you that my son could be innocent. Come on, Darren!"

And that was the ignoble end to Darren Kaye's time at Hogwarts.

In the buzzing Slytherin common room that same night, Malfoy met Sev's eyes across the room and gave him a surreptitious thumbs up.

"One down," he mouthed.


	3. Chapter Three

Targets two and three were a fifth year called Liana Whittaker, and a second year, Rick Allison.

Sev picked Rick as victim two, because that broke up any pattern of 'working his way down' through the school.

Working on Rick, he had two assets in the name of Graham Goyle and Alex Nott, both in his year group. Through the friendship between Colin and Graham, the two boys were in fairly tight with Malfoy; even so, Sev went to ask Malfoy for permission to involve them.

Obviously, his judgement of their loyalties was as good as Malfoy's, probably better. However, asking Malfoy reinforced the impression that he was working _for_ him, and that was important. Though Malfoy was smart enough to capitalise on others' strengths, he would come down like the plague on anyone who looked like threatening his position.

For the moment, his role as leader was fully secure because he was the only one with any contact with his mysterious master. But Sev knew that if he started to get wary of any of his underlings, their chances of making it to that inner circle were zero.

And Snape very much needed to be in that inner circle.

"Nott and Goyle?" Malfoy rubbed his forehead thoughtfully as he leaned back against the headboard. Year Three Dorm B had become a very strange mix of boys' bedroom and tactical planning centre. When Malfoy and his followers gathered in a corner to talk, you could never tell if they would be discussing the overthrow of the current wizarding system or Quidditch scores and Charms homework.

Sev allowed him a few minutes to contemplate the idea. The less you pushed something with Malfoy, the more convinced he would become that it had been his own idea. Malfoy was very much in favour of his own ideas.

"Yes," decided Malfoy slowly, "yes, we can use them. Put them on this. See if they can make it work. If they can..." He leaned across to rummage through his top drawer. "If they can, then give them these."

He reached over, and Snape took the contents of his cupped hand. It was another pair of the skull-and-serpent rings.

As Sev pocketed them with a nod and strode off to find Goyle, the sense of subtle triumph he felt was nothing to do with having his plan accepted. Malfoy had given him the rings, and more importantly the decision of whether or not to bestow them.

He was now, in all important senses, Malfoy's second-in-command.

* * *

His plan to deal with Rick Allison was less subtle than the previous plot. That had nothing to do with running out of ideas, and everything to do with not leaving patterns. Trying too hard to not leave traces left a trace all its own; sometimes, the best way to allay suspicions was to be obvious.

Malfoy had been uncertain, when Sev had first explained the plan; however, he had been quick to gather the double-edged reasoning behind it. "I like the way your mind works," he had finally said, with a razor smile.

Sometimes, the best way to hide a plot to get rid of mudbloods was to daub "Mudbloods go home!" in big letters over everything. Nobody would expect such blatantly thick-headed prejudice to be part of a larger deviousness.

Nott and Goyle's job was to make Rick's life a living hell. More importantly, they were to anonymously make it a living hell. If they were ever caught, they would deny everything, and certainly admit no ties to Snape or Malfoy.

However, Slytherin was the natural home of secrecy. When this sort of thing went on, nobody saw anything. Rick never reported what was being done to him - possibly because he was too petrified to dare tell anybody.

In some ways, this secret bullying was even worse than what Malfoy had done to Josh Matthews. At least Josh had _known_ who was out to get him. Sev had carefully schooled Nott and Goyle to make no outward change in their attitude to him. Rick had been at Hogwarts for over a year, and this sudden attack from all sides was completely without warning, explanation, or clues.

Rick would open his books, and find vitriolic anti-mudblood passages scrawled all over them. Things of his would be broken or vandalised, and Sev ordered that there should _always_ be a note claiming responsibility. All of them were signed in the same way - "Society for Purity". All of them told him to get his mudblood self the hell out of their school. All of them warned that he'd been cursed, and if he ever tried to breathe a word, he would instantly fall down stone dead.

Sev was fairly sure that at the beginning, Rick didn't believe a word of it. However, he had a good enough reading of Rick to know that he would try to deal with it himself first. By the time things got bad enough for him to think he needed help, he would have started to at least half-believe the story of the sudden-death curse.

So far as Sev knew, there was no real Society for Purity, but that was part of the beauty of it. Rick had absolutely no way of telling who might be in it, or how many there might be. And Sev made sure the Society took credit for everything.

Not just the things they'd done. He and the others kept up a near twenty-four hour observation on Rick's life, and _anything_ that went wrong they took the credit for. When he got flu in February, they sent him a note to say they'd put something in his food. When his little sister back home broke her arm, they told him how they'd put a curse on her, and that it would get worse if he didn't leave.

When Nott and Goyle ran out of valuables to break or destroy, they got more inventive. Rather than removing things from Rick's stuff, they started to add things. Rather unpleasant things.

Sev's talent for potions came into play here. He never made anything particularly dangerous or deadly, but they were all things that _looked_ extremely scary. Innocuous objects like quills or textbooks would be dusted with solutions that made his skin turn purple or his hands swell up. Rick quickly became terrified to touch or even eat _anything_ that had been unattended for half a second.

In addition to the potions, there were what Nott referred to happily as 'presents'. At first these were things that were harmless but shocking to encounter - foul-smelling solutions shoved in his sock drawer, something slimy under the pillow, squishy grapes enchanted to look like eyeballs.

Then came the dead animals. These started small, with mice and small birds, and got progressively bigger. All of the animal corpses, in varying states of decay, were provided by Simon Lestrange. Not even Avery or Malfoy ever dared to ask him where he got them from.

On Snape's orders, Rick was abruptly left alone for almost two weeks with not the slightest explanation. Then, three days before the Easter holiday, Rick's bed was visited by the most unpleasant corpse yet; a dead cat, dug up from where it had been buried several months ago. It had been Rick's pet in his first year at Hogwarts, and had been in his family since he was two.

That Friday, Rick had packed up not just a holiday bag but everything he owned. Sev didn't expect him to be back.

* * *

Rick was not the only one to be leaving the school over Easter. Lucius Malfoy also packed his bags, and when Avery asked if he was going home, he smiled tigerishly and said "In a sense."

Sev used Malfoy's absence to put into play plan three, of which he might be a little less approving. Malfoy might want his scheming to go undetected, but he still liked to flavour it with a little cruelty. Sev's plans to get rid of Liana Whittaker were entirely too... nice.

Sev happened to know that Liana was a model student. Not only that, but she was studying languages, with the intention of working in one of the Ministry's international branches.

Sev also happened to know, having read a great deal, that on and off through the years, there had been an old tradition of transfers between wizarding schools. The European three, Hogwarts, Durmstrang and Beauxbatons, had chosen one or two of their best and brightest students to make the trade once they had finished their O.W.Ls and were going on to take their N.E.W.Ts.

That tradition had never been actually brought to an official stop, but it had trailed off due to the increasing insularity of Durmstrang. The Dark Arts oriented wizarding school had largely closed itself off from the other two after the last Triwizard Tournament eighty years ago. Hogwarts and Beauxbatons, however, were still on semi-friendly terms.

With that in mind, at the start of the Easter break, Sev sat down and did something he had never done before in his eight terms at Hogwarts thus far; he wrote to his uncle.

His mother's brother, the man who had raised him, had always been too busy to pay him much attention. This was due to the fairly high-level position he held in the Ministry of Magic - a position that had to do with international co-ordination. He had links to figures in a number of European organisations, including the headmistress of Beauxbatons.

The letter he wrote to his uncle would have caused snorts of disbelief if anybody at Hogwarts had intercepted it; none of them would have recognised it as penned by Severus Snape. To the teachers and the Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws, he was a frighteningly quiet enigma; to the Slytherins, an icy, dark-magic using genius; to the Gryffindors, a vitriol-spitting master-hexer. All of those impressions were to a certain extent manufactured. But even Lily, who knew him better than perhaps anyone, would have laughed out loud if someone had told her this letter was written by him.

He wrote a nice, chatty, friendly letter to his uncle about his 'friend' Liana Whittaker and how he'd really like to surprise her. It was a sweet, light-hearted and selfless attempt for a caring student to do something for another.

Sev supposed it said something about his relationship with his uncle that the man didn't for one second find anything odd about it. The letter the Ministry owl brought back was much like the conversations his uncle had with him; vaguely approving in a politely distracted way.

Sev refrained from snorting out loud at his uncle's words about how he "knew you would make friends at Hogwarts; you're such a charming young man", but his lips did quirk up at the corners. He wondered if perhaps he should show that sentence to Lily next time she made one of her tiresome attempts to trap him and talk to him - she would probably choke so disbelievingly on it he could make a quick getaway.

However, perhaps aware how little his nephew asked for, his uncle made good on his promise to investigate, and, fortunately, to keep the gesture anonymous. He contacted the Beauxbatons headmistress, and a few days later Sev overheard Dumbledore and Malachite discussing it at the dinner table. Malachite was plainly delighted; he had been in a foul mood ever since the Darren Kaye debacle, and this was a way to give his house some much-needed good press. All the teaching staff seemed to agree Liana was perfect transfer material, and they were all utterly stumped as to who could have recommended her.

Being Severus Snape, he wasn't even slightly tempted to give them any knowing smiles.

The details would take time to work out, but the transfer wouldn't be until next year anyway. Everyone seemed to agree it was a great idea to establish inter-school ties again, especially in these dark times, and when Liana came back from her Easter holidays it was to find a neatly written letter propped up on her pillowcase.

Sev didn't need to have it confirmed by his uncle - he could hear the shrieking from way over in his own dorm. Liana proceeded to lead several of her friends in an impromptu conga line through the Slytherin common room and then out into the school, witnessed with amusement by the teachers who had all been lurking to see her reaction.

Malfoy and his skull-and-serpent gang were just about the only ones who didn't join in the good-natured applause.

"Your doing, I presume?" said Malfoy sharply when they had retired to their dorms. Sev had been expecting to do some fast talking to justify his actions, but to his surprise Malfoy seemed... amused?

"You're not angry," he observed. For anybody else, it might have been a question, but Sev always knew what he was reading.

"It's inconsequential." Malfoy waved away the whole issue airily. "So she gets away now; it won't matter in the long run. We'll get them all eventually. For now... let them run." He smiled darkly. "It makes the eventual hunt much more fun."

Sev knew something must have happened over the holidays to make him so cheerful. He quickly scanned him, looking for any visible sign of what it might have been, and noticed one important difference immediately.

"You're not wearing your ring," he observed. He had made a point of never taking his off, and the others usually wore theirs, but Malfoy had always made a big thing of displaying his prominently. It was, Sev knew, his way of thumbing his nose at Dumbledore and the rest of the school; showing off to everybody his sign of allegiance and revelling in the fact that they had no clue.

Malfoy smiled delightedly. "I don't need to. Crabbe, close the door." Crabbe did as ordered, and the four boys clustered around Malfoy.

With a smile, Malfoy took hold of the left sleeve of his robes and slowly, dramatically, pushed it back. He held his hand flat against his bare elbow for a few moments, then pulled it away with a flourish.

Beneath it, emblazoned on his skin, was a vivid red image. It looked a little like a tattoo, although Sev suspected it was nothing so simple as an injection of ink. The symbol he knew very well; he had seen it once before, blazing against the sky. A skull with a snake for a tongue; the mark of the Death Eaters.

He had seen it before; the others had not. Though the skull had hovered over the Forbidden Forest for over an hour on the night he had found the corpse of Auriga Cephus, it had been late in the night and few had seen it. The men from the Ministry Dumbledore had summoned had quickly taken away the skeleton and the magical note that had been left with it.

"Cool... What is it?" asked Avery eagerly.

Malfoy smiled, and produced the old serpent ring from a pocket. He tossed it in the air and caught it casually. "This; this, you can take on and off." He showed it to them all. Then he prodded his arm. "This, you can't. It's a mark of his favour, and this one can't be taken away. This is no temporary test measure - this is the real thing."

Sev had long suspected that Malfoy's master was a Death Eater; now he knew it for sure. He knew, however, that probing Malfoy would not yield any more information about who this mysterious 'he' was.

The others obviously didn't. "Who is 'he'?" asked Avery. "Did you go to see him? Will you take us?"

Malfoy smiled enigmatically, enjoying his knowledge. "All in good time," he said, in a sensible tone calculated to madden. The smirk faded into something more serious. "As for the rest of you; yes, very soon, I think. He's wary of new people, but thanks to Severus we're well on our way to proving ourselves." He gave Sev an approving nod.

"The mudbloods are all out, or on their way. We've purified our own backyard - now it's time to tell the rest of the world we're coming." He smiled widely. "What we need now is... a really big gesture."


	4. Chapter Four

Sev soon discovered that the mark on his arm was not the only new thing Malfoy had acquired over the holidays. Later that week, in Care of Magical Creatures, they were out by the Forbidden Forest trying to train Caretynes in their groups.

The Caretynes were like white lions with golden manes and spotted coats, except for their long horns and tusks - and their tendency to shoot flames from their mouths or either ear without the slightest warning. The class was predictably chaotic, Pete Pettigrew setting the brim of his hat on fire and his friends unsure whether to laugh or glare at the Slytherins for doing so.

Malfoy waited until Professor Cuero was occupied trying to put Peter's hat out, then pulled Sev aside. "Quickly! While nobody's looking." The two boys slipped deeper into the Forbidden Forest.

"I wanted to show you something," he said with a smirk, as soon as they were well clear of their classmates.

"What is it?" asked Sev, careful to sound eager enough. Though he was always keen to learn, he doubted any enchantment Malfoy had to show him would bring him much pleasure.

"I didn't want to show the others how to do this just yet," Malfoy confided. "They're soldiers. Workers. They're never gonna see the big picture, but you..." He shot Sev a pointed glance. "You could get in good with these people. You've got brains, and you could be nearly as powerful as me."

Sev schooled his expression even more carefully than he usually did. Malfoy would have to be _completely_ blinded by his own arrogance to not realise that Snape might very well do better than that.

"He didn't just give me the Dark Mark," Malfoy revealed, rubbing his arm almost absently. "He showed me how to make it." He smiled cruelly. "It's about time we gave all these Muggle-lovers a bit of a scare, don't you think?"

He waved his wand with a flourish that Sev was willing to be wasn't part of the spell, and intoned in a deep voice "_Morsmordre!_"

Green light exploded from the wand and flared up into the air. For a second, Sev saw an almost shocked expression cross Malfoy's face, as if he hadn't really realised this kind of magic could come from him. Sev saw the green stars of the Death Eater symbol already beginning to swirl into shape.

"Hellfire!" Malfoy gasped, and Sev wondered if he'd even known exactly how hugely and vividly the Mark would display. It was already rising into the sky, swelling rapidly; it would be visible for miles.

For a moment Malfoy stared up at his own handiwork with awe, then his grey eyes met Snape's and panic flared in them. "Run!" he advised, scurrying quickly back towards the safety of their class group. How very Lucius Malfoy, Sev noted. Utterly devoted to his hate group's agenda - provided there was no chance of his getting caught.

Nobody saw them arrive; everybody's attention was completely focused on the growing Dark Mark. There was an oddly intent look on Professor Cuero's face, and the angular lines of his body seemed full of tension.

They all stood there watching for a long moment. There was an uneasy murmur rumbling through the class, and little Peter Pettigrew looked just about ready to faint. Jade Creevy and Helen Beck clutched at each other, and James slipped a comforting arm round Lily. To Snape's sharp eyes she didn't look scared, only anxious and locked in deep thought, but she didn't move to shove him off, either.

Finally Cuero turned to look back at the students. His eyes met Malfoy's, and there was something in them... _He knows exactly who did it,_ Sev observed. But he said nothing to reveal as much.

"All of you, back to your rooms," he ordered. "Potter, go and get the headmaster." James nodded quickly and sped away. The others were slower to disperse, still gaping at the bloated skull hanging obscenely above them.

Malfoy seemed to have recovered from his panic as soon as it was clear no one would point the finger at him. He pulled Sev aside when they got to their dorm and said eagerly "Cuero - did you see? He's one of ours!"

"He knows you did it," Sev nodded, although that was still a distance away from him being a Death Eater in his mind. But of course, somebody like Malfoy would easily assume that somebody else would believe in their agenda.

"Exactly! And he didn't say anything. You saw his face; he recognised the Mark. Nick!" He snagged Avery as he came through the door. "Cuero; did he do anything weird?"

"When the... skull thing appeared?"

"Yeah - were you watching?"

Avery's forehead creased into a frown. "He, uh..." He thought for a moment. "Oh! Yes, he did! He kinda... hugged himself or grabbed his arm or something."

A liquid smile spread across Malfoy's features. "See?" he said triumphantly. He pushed back the sleeve of his robe, revealing the skull tattoo - looking darker and stronger than before, closer to the colour of blood. "He has the Mark, same as I do! He's one of ours."

"Perhaps," said Sev more coolly. He would have to observe Cuero far more carefully before he would jump to any such conclusion - it wasn't in his nature to assume.

"That was you, wasn't it?" said Colin Crabbe eagerly, as he burst into their dorm. Malfoy just grinned, cat-like.

"The Gryffindors'll try to tell them it was us," Avery warned him. Malfoy shrugged.

"So? Their word against ours."

"Or it will be. Give me your wand," Sev ordered.

"Huh?" Malfoy frowned.

"Your wand, quickly! They'll be here any minute."

The blond boy looked uncertain, but his sudden fear that he hadn't thought of everything spurred him to take orders when he wouldn't normally stand for it. He quickly pulled his wand out and pressed it into Snape's hands.

The wand felt unfamiliar in his grip, the wrong length and the wrong texture, but it was still a wand. Sev made a few practise sweeps, and then cast a few spells in quick succession. "_Lumos! Nox! Orchideus! Relashio! Avis!_"

The wand lit up, went out again, produced a bunch of flowers, sparked, and sent a small flock of birds twittering out of the nearest windows. His fellow Slytherins were staring at him as if they couldn't be sure whether to think he was insane or give him a round of applause.

"What the hell was that?" asked Malfoy, not taking the wand back as Severus held it out to him.

"The wand tests; they do them when they're checking wands for competitions and the like." Sev poked the wand to him again, and he took it gingerly.

"But why-?"

There was a commotion in the common room outside, and he heard Professor Fractalis call for the third years. "No time! Cast a spell! Anything; just the lumos, whatever. Quickly!" he snapped, as Malfoy dithered.

"_L-lumos!_" In his confusion, Malfoy barely stuttered the word correctly, and the light it produced was a feeble flicker. He cancelled it with a snap of his wrist, and looked at Snape questioningly. Sev gave him a quick nod, and led the way through into the common room.

Professor Fractalis' usual timid expression had been replaced with one that was equal parts nervous and stern. "Boys, there has been a very serious infraction on school grounds. I'm going to have to ask you for your wands."

Malfoy looked to Sev in silent alarm, but he gave an almost imperceptible nod. With what looked like a slight gulp, he held his wand out to the deputy headmaster.

Fractalis went over to the first of the boys, Jack Brisingamen, and took his wand. He waved it and snapped the words "_Prior Incanto!_"

After a second, a fuzzy image appeared at the tip of the wand; it showed a small human figure summoning something to his hand - the 'accio' charm. Fractalis left it hanging in the air and repeated his spell; another, similar image appeared. He studied this one, too, and then said swiftly "_Deletrius!_" and the images collapsed in on themselves. He handed Jack back his wand and moved onto the next.

His search turned up quite a few little tricks whose academic uses were somewhat doubtful, but he barely even seemed to notice. By the time he got to Malfoy, the blond-haired boy was looking positively sick with nerves.

"_Prior Incanto!_" The feeble flicker of Malfoy's light spell recreated itself. Fractalis ignored it and repeated the enchantment. A silvery mist sprang up... and dissolved into nothingness. He frowned, and tried again, with the same result.

The deputy headmaster gave Malfoy a sharp look. "Have you used this wand at all today?" he asked.

Nervous or not, Malfoy was a quick study. "Uh - only to do the light spell," he lied automatically. Fractalis just looked at him for a moment, then silently handed the wand back. He tested the remainder, then nodded, and walked to the door.

"Hmm; good. I told Professor Dumbledore that it couldn't have been any of our students, and I'm glad to see I was right. Okay, all of you stay in Slytherin quarters until it's time for your next lesson, please - the rest of this period is cancelled."

When he'd gone, Malfoy staggered back into the dorm room and flattened himself against the wall, breathing heavily. As Snape stepped inside, he stared at him and asked "What the hell was that? Why didn't it-?"

"The mixed signatures confused it," he explained with a matter-of-fact shrug. "So many spells, cast so quickly... swapping the wand from person to person like that... Prior Incanto was only ever really designed to go back one stage, and it just couldn't follow the trail back to the last spell. It acted as if there wasn't one - as if the wand hadn't been used in a while."

"And you knew it was going to do that?" Malfoy demanded, eyebrows raised.

Snape shrugged again. "It seemed... logical."

"Logical?" Malfoy spluttered as if he was choking, but it gradually turned into laughter. He clapped Sev on the shoulder delightedly. "You're really something, Severus, do you know that? You're really something."

"So I've been told," he replied, perfectly dryly.

* * *

Malfoy might have seen enough to be convinced of Professor Cuero's loyalties, but Sev was less easily swayed. Sneaking about and spying was less easily done now that he had given his invisibility cloak away, but he'd always had a talent for it. He could move very surely and silently, and most importantly he _never_ panicked.

If the others had ever woken and noticed him gone, they probably assumed that he was about some small schoolboy mischief like their own - or, correctly enough, that he had insomnia. Snape's lack of sleep never troubled him - indeed, he relished the extra hours of thinking time it gave him. He normally slept only five or six hours a night, and losing a few of those little troubled him.

The caretaker, Mr. Pringle, was always on patrol, but Sev was a flitting shadow. He roamed the halls almost every night, and if any of the ghosts were aware of his passage they had long since grown used to it.

Reading voraciously and patrolling as he did, Sev knew a great many of Hogwarts' secrets. He knew where all the house dormitories and common rooms were, and both the staff's private offices and their quarters.

He had a hunch Cuero might be a night-owl like himself, and in any case, nobody was likely to be sleeping soundly tonight. Sure enough, the red-headed teacher was sitting in his office, quill scratching away with a fairly furious intensity.

Sev found that in itself very interesting. Care of Magical Creatures was hardly a classroom-based lesson; it couldn't possibly be anything work-related he was scribbling down.

He waited silently for a quarter of an hour as Cuero wrote. He wasn't terribly surprised that the teacher completely failed to mutter key phrases to himself or conveniently contact someone and explain himself to them. Maybe that was how the likes of James Potter expected their adventures to turn out, but Sev knew that if you wanted to find things out, it took hours of painstaking observation. Even people who _were_ up to something usually spent a great deal of time doing absolutely nothing interesting.

Tonight, though, was something of a special night, and when Cuero had finished whatever he was writing to his satisfaction, he got up from his desk and left the office. Sev faded silently into the background, and then padded after him through the corridors.

He quickly surmised that they were going to the Owlery, and after figuring which route Cuero was taking, split off from him and found a different one. He arrived up in the tower before the professor, and concealed himself in a corner. The owls barely stirred at his presence; he was in the habit of visiting Hogwarts animal residents from time to time, getting them used to the sight and scent of him. Severus Snape always planned ahead.

He had quickly learned that almost any hiding place could work provided you _stayed still_. Ninety-nine percent of people, especially in a neutral setting like Hogwarts, would simply never expect anybody to be spying on them. There might be nosy students lurking about, but everybody knew kids couldn't keep silent and still, didn't they?

'Silence' and 'stillness' could easily have been Sev's middle names. After all, they fit in rather neatly with the general naming scheme.

He noted with interest the way Cuero studied the massed owls, instead of just giving the message to the first to approach him. He looked to Sev's eyes as if he was not searching for a favourite, but going through a mental checklist - as if he was being wary not to use the same owls too often. Interesting.

Finally, Cuero picked out an owl, and gave it the message. It was sealed in a small envelope, and Sev's sharp eyes noted that there was no address on the front. Instead, Cuero simply gave the owl a name; "Gorvic Shimmersby." The owl silently launched itself into the dark, and Sev quietly filed the name away in his memory for the future.

Cuero watched the owl fly away, then slipped his hands in the pockets of his robes and started back down the stairs. Sev made no attempt to follow; the stairs in this tower were far too creaky to chance following somebody.

There was no light up here, so it was safe to stand by the window and observe - even had he not stayed still, his movement could easily have been mistaken for that of one of the owls.

In the bright light of the full moon, he saw Cuero leave the tower, and stalk rapidly back towards his quarters. Sev was about to consider returning to his own dorm when something caught his eye.

At first he thought the tiny movement in the grass below was nothing more than a mouse. But none of the owls beside him paid any attention, and after a second he saw it again. The springy grass was flattening and bouncing back momentarily, as if under some sort of pressure... As if, in fact, somebody was walking on it under an invisibility cloak.

Lily? Or somebody else? Sev had acquired the cloak from the murderous Potions teacher, Fennel, at the end of the First Year; they were not exactly common toys. But there were other ways to make yourself invisible, if you were a powerful enough wizard...

He tracked the motions carefully, focusing intently for fear of losing them against the gentle actions of the wind. Finally, the invisible footsteps came to a halt beneath the large, flailing tree Professor Parilia had nicknamed the Whomping Willow. The tree was a fairly new addition to the Hogwarts grounds, planted the summer before he had started there; it had taken some months for the more adventurous students to learn that 'stay well clear of the branches' was not exactly optional advice.

As Snape watched, there was the liquid shimmer of the cloak being dropped. From beneath it emerged not one, but two figures. James Potter and Sirius Black.

In the time it would have taken for most people to gasp in surprise, Sev's brain was zipping through the logical connections. Clearly, this was Lily's cloak; the odds of James having one of his own were very small, and he hadn't when Sev had seen him wandering the halls in earlier years.

Lily was fond of James; however, she well knew that Sev had given her the cloak for her own protection, and she wasn't frivolous by any means. If she had lent the cloak to James and Sirius, then this was more than mischief they were about.

Sev watched as Black picked up a stick and prodded at something on the treetrunk. Abruptly, the flailing limbs froze in position. A secret trick to paralysing the plant? Dumbledore had to have known about it when he asked for it to be planted. As the two boys descended into some kind of secret passage, Sev's mind was looping back to the end of his first year.

James Potter had rushed to Lily's rescue when she was Stunned by the rogue teacher Fennel. Professor Malachite had demanded, on one of his usual 'different standards for Gryffindors and Slytherins' riffs, to know why he'd been out so late at night. _I was going to check on somebody,_ he had said. And Dumbledore had waved Malachite silent with the words _I know what this is about._

Sev remembered that night. He had spotted an invisibility cloak then, and perhaps for the same reasons - under direct moonlight, you could sometimes see the tiniest shimmer of motion that wouldn't otherwise be visible.

Under direct moonlight...

Three years' worth of tiny clues abruptly clicked into place, and Snape started to smile. Suddenly, it all made sense...


	5. Chapter Five

Sev made his way rapidly downstairs to the bottom of the tower. Once he was there, he found a dark corner and stood watching the foot of the Whomping Willow with a certain amount of curiosity. If what he'd just suspected was actually true, then the passage under that tree was not the safest place to be right now...

In about thirty seconds' time, the two boys came barrelling out as if their robes were on fire. Sirius yanked the cloak out after them before the passageway could close on it, and they both collapsed together; out of breath, but laughing. They'd probably come a hairsbreadth away from their deaths, but neither of them seemed to care. Sev didn't suppose either of them really believed that they weren't actually invincible.

Not even James and Sirius, though, were quite crazy enough to be visiting and then running from a werewolf just for the fun of it - especially when it was one of their closest friends in human form. They had to be trying to do something, trying to test something... Sev realised they must be trying to find some charm or enchantment that would allow them to visit their friend in wolf form without being attacked.

Clearly, they hadn't found it yet. If they'd known since the first year, they'd probably been doing this every month; searching and searching for something to try, then ducking down the tunnel and risking death to find out if it worked.

This, Sev was fairly sure, was because neither of them were creatures of logic.

Much of the next morning he spent researching methods of suppressing and controlling lycanthropy. Not, of course, that he would endanger his position by passing such information to James and Sirius - but it was knowledge that had suddenly gone from trivia to something relevant; and Sev always liked to have the relevant data at his fingertips.

The books all spoke of how it couldn't be done, but Sev knew how to read between the lines. He duly noted comments about how werewolves were less enraged by the company of animals than men, and various discussions of spells that seemed effective in warding them off.

There were also rumours of a Wolfsbane potion that would quiet a werewolf and render it harmless during the full moon - but if the recipe had ever existed, it had been lost in the mists of time.

Sev had no way to recover that recipe - but he had a true flair for potions and a brain that could recall every tiny clue that had been fed into it. He strongly suspected that a few successive attempts would allow him to make a useable Wolfsbane... but there would be no safe chance to test it, so he merely squirreled the idea away in his head in case he should need it in later years.

However, whilst he was browsing the potions section of Professor Malachite's private library, he found an interesting little recipe in the back of _Dark Elixirs_... Trustasiem.

A variant on the powerful Veritaseum truth potion, Trustasiem had the interesting little quirk of making a its drinker feel extremely trusting... spilling their innermost secrets not because they were compelled to, but because they believed themselves safe in doing so.

An even nastier little side-effect was that the victim, if not put under too much pressure, would not recall the questioning session at all. Though their original feelings for the person concerned would return, the time for which they had been under the influence would be forever cloaked in trust for them - the victim would be literally unable to contemplate the idea that they could have been used in any way.

No wonder this potion was found in a book of the Dark Arts. It was a deeply nasty and violating little mixture... and Sev could think of a good use to put it to.

Guilt was not a completely alien concept to Severus Snape, but his logical brain would not allow him to apply it to himself in any situation where it wasn't justified. There was nobility, and there was pragmatism; and nobility was for the James Potters of this world, not the Severus Snapes.

The delicate nature of the relationship he was building with Lucius Malfoy made it far too dangerous to use the potion on him. Besides, Sev was sure Malfoy didn't know half as much as he thought he did; his partnership of sorts with the other boy was not a short-term venture. He would have to follow Malfoy all the way up the Death Eater ladder to learn the innermost secrets.

However, such a potion would be ideal for quickly questioning one suspicious individual; Professor Cuero. Two or three drops, a similar number of questions, and it would be done.

Perhaps, in a way, Sev's cold and calculating nature made such a venture a less bad thing for him to attempt than for another. Another, no matter how 'noble', might be tempted to pry too deeply into someone else's personal secrets, but Sev would ask the relevant questions and inquire no further.

The biggest difficulty was going to be slipping Cuero the potion without his knowledge. Hogwarts students were not renowned for thoughtfully bringing their teachers food and drink, least of all a cold, distant boy like Severus Snape.

It would be easy enough to slip the potion in with some misdirection at dinner - but that was the last thing he wanted. This had to be done in complete privacy, if it was to be done at all.

When Sev had still owned the invisibility cloak, he had used it to explore every corner of Hogwarts - not just the innermost sanctums. That was what made him different from the run of the mill ambitious Slytherins; all of them would think to study Dumbledore and Malachite, but very few would bother to track the movements of the caretaker and groundskeeper.

Sev happened to know that Hagrid, the half-giant groundskeeper, was extremely fond of animals; apparently, the fiercer, the better. He also loved to make sweets, albeit rather badly.

That, in Sev's mind, added up to Professor Cuero having stacks of Hagrid-made goodies thrust upon him as the groundskeeper took any excuse to drop in on him and check out the latest dangerous beasts. Cuero, if he had any sense, would approach them with caution, but often Hagrid's penchant for huge volumes of sugar encouraged people to risk broken teeth and try their luck.

Sev was an accomplished opener of locks, both magical and non. He had spent a great deal of time last year studying the mechanics and practicalities of getting through doors and windows undetected. An invisibility cloak was only as good as the wearer's ability to pass unnoticed.

He tailed Cuero several more nights; never catching him up to anything suspicious, but closely following his routine. When he had a good idea of exactly when was safe, he silently let himself into the Professor's hut.

Unlike most of the Hogwarts staff, Cuero lived in a hut in the grounds like Hagrid. He claimed to prefer to be close to the animals, although most people agreed it was more that he didn't like to be near other people.

The first time Sev broke in, he did nothing and touched nothing. He carefully studied the positions of everything, checked out all potential hiding places, and tested all the exits. Then he waited patiently.

Three days later, his observations were rewarded. Hagrid dropped in on the Professor, who bore his presence with a kind of long-suffering resignation. When he departed, he left behind an enormous plate of various sweets. Cuero regarded it with a distinctly wary expression, and then hurried out of the hut to do his usual rounds of the magical animals.

Sev found that telling. If Cuero hadn't intended to eat the sweets at some stage, he would have either taken them out to surreptitiously feed to the animals, or - if he worried about what that might do to their health - simply disposed of them. The fact that he had left them behind strongly hinted that his sweet tooth outweighed his sense of self-preservation.

Armed with the tiny vial of Trustasiem he had secretly made up, Sev quietly slipped in and added a few drops to the tray of sweets. Like the Veritaseum it was derived from, Trustasiem was colourless, odourless, and tasteless. Once Cuero had taken a few drops of the potion in, the effect would be instant and last for nearly an hour.

Sev secreted himself in a dark space behind a wardrobe, and cast a little spell that had come in useful during his first year. It wasn't as foolproof as an invisibility cloak, but it made him... shadowy. Professor Cuero wouldn't see him unless he came and peered into that corner with the express purpose of checking for someone hiding there.

He knew how long it usually took Cuero to make his rounds, but remained unflustered when he was late back. A less experienced spy might either worry that he was missing something or panic about being discovered, and try to leave. Sev knew that doing that was just about the best guarantee of getting caught you could give yourself.

He waited patiently, and surely enough, a few minutes later Cuero returned. He sat down and picked up a book, but didn't even look at the tray of sweets. Sev was untroubled, prepared to wait as long as it took.

It took nearly half an hour. Cuero kept glancing over at the tray, grimacing, and looking away again. Sev suspected he had a raging sweet tooth, but had met Hagrid's attempts at cooking before.

Finally, greed won out. The teacher moved over to the tray of sweets, stared down at them for a moment, and reached for something misshapen and oozing honey. He pulled a face at it, and then gingerly popped it into his mouth. Apparently having got lucky and not broken any teeth, he returned to his books. Sev waited a few moments, and then emerged from his hiding place.

Professor Cuero looked up at the sound, but he neither jumped nor looked angry. "Oh, hello there, Severus," he said pleasantly. "Were you waiting for me?" The harsh lines to his face and grating edge to his voice had both smoothed out, and he suddenly seemed much younger.

Sev casually made his way over to the seat opposite him, and sat down. With Cuero under the effects of Trustasiem, he could have snapped off his questions interrogation-style and the teacher wouldn't think it odd - but blatantly relying on the infallibility of his magic had never been Sev's style. An irony, perhaps, because the nature that made him so cautious also made his magic more reliable than anybody else's.

"Professor," he said, similarly pleasantly. Any Gryffindor who dropped in to see the two of them 'chatting' so nicely would probably drop dead of shock. "I was hoping you could answer a few questions for me?"

"Of course, of course," agreed Cuero airily. It took a moment for Sev to realise who his brand-new open manner reminded him of: Professor Dumbledore. It was that same unblinking faith that those around him could be trusted - in Sev's opinion, the one flaw in the headmaster's powers of observation. He had every bit of the intelligence and observation skills Severus owned - but they weren't tempered with that cynical 'assume nothing' attitude that made a perfect spy.

He kept his tone as light as if he had called in to check the details of a homework assignment. "I was wondering if you could tell me about the skull symbol we saw in the sky last week?"

"Ah, yes. The Dark Mark." Cuero frowned. "Nasty business. Symbol of the Death Eaters, you know."

From those short sentences, Sev had already derived much of what he needed to know. Cuero was aware of the Death Eaters, didn't belong to them, and didn't agree with their mindset. Which made the attitude he displayed in classes... interesting.

"You know a lot about the Death Eaters?" he asked with a tone of innocent curiosity.

"Ah, yes, I'm an expert, you know. I was with the team that investigated their actions in the Harrowgate case."

'With the team' - that meant he was part of the Ministry of Magic; probably an Auror. Which meant Malfoy's casual assumptions of his loyalties were deeply misguided.

"So you're here on a covert mission then?"

"Oh, yes. Very hush-hush." Cuero tapped the side of his nose. "I can rely on you, I know, but there are a lot of students here..."

"Malfoy and his friends?"

"Hmm, yes. Thirteen years old, and already well on their way to being corrupt. Get them young, and you'll have them for life. Oh, he's a cunning one, this Voldemort."

"Voldemort?" It was a name Sev had never heard before - the 'mort' on the end, meaning death, made him sure that it wasn't any traditional wizarding name, and it certainly wasn't anything from the Muggle world. "Who's he?"

Cuero pulled a face. "Well, nobody knows, do they? A couple of the Death Eaters we've observed have mentioned him, and we think he's their leader, but other than the fact that he's in Europe somewhere, we know nothing. Hard, very hard, to get decent spies in their camp. A problem _they_ apparently don't have," he added, a trifle bitterly.

"There are spies here?"

"Just the one, we think, but it's anyone's guess who. Those morons in the Ministry are convinced it's young Hagrid - but the man's a gentle giant, and hardly a schemer. Obviously it isn't Dumbledore... but anyone else is fair game. You saw yourself how they slipped Fennel in, and he was hardly subtle, was he? This other one's a far more slippery character."

"You think this is the person who killed Professor Cephus?"

Cuero scowled. "Sure of it. But they're clever - far too clever to reveal themselves too easily."

"So you're trying to convince them you're one of theirs?"

"Yes." He grinned slightly. "Picking on the Gryffindors was a Slytherin tradition back when I was at school; _that_ never changes. Paint yourself as a true Slytherin, and they're half the way to believing you're evil."

Sev nodded, getting up. He had all the answers he needed, and hanging around for more was asking for trouble.

"What they don't seem to realise," Cuero reflected half to himself, "is that while half of us _might_ grow up to be dark wizards, the other half grow up to be the best damn Aurors in the business. I mean, look at you. You're one of ours, aren't you?"

Sev paused on the way to the door, and permitted himself to smile wryly at it. Despite the fact that he had forced Cuero to believe that through magical trickery, it was really nothing shy of the truth.

"Yes; I'm one of yours."

He slipped out of the door, and left Cuero to recover his senses and lose his memory.


	6. Chapter Six

In the days Sev had spent learning Cuero's secret, Malfoy had not been idle. He had repeatedly mentioned the need for a 'big gesture', but remained tight-lipped about what it exactly it was to entail.

Sev had observed him sending and receiving several letters via his family owl, Meraugis. None of the letters had an address on them and Malfoy never named names, but the owl seemed to know where it was going. Sev wondered if his parents were similarly mixed up with the Death Eaters; Malfoy seldom mentioned his mother and father, except to point out how rich and powerful and important they were.

Finally, the owl returned bearing a parcel that seemed to be the answer he had been waiting for. He gathered the other boys in his dorm, waving the package triumphantly.

"I have it," he announced, with a dark smile.

"Have what?" demanded Avery. "You've been so close-mouthed with this, Lucius, it's like trying to pry sweets from a Hufflepuff." The boys laughed nastily. It was a Hogwarts myth that all Hufflepuffs were fat and unathletic.

Malfoy was still smiling. "I have... the perfect gesture," he said, overdramatically.

"Tell us," begged Colin eagerly.

"I can do better than that... I'll show you. I intend to use this on the whole school - but I do believe a little demonstration is in order before we start." He rubbed his hands together. "First we'll have to find ourselves a mudblood..." He reflected for a moment, then smirked to himself. "Potter's little girlfriend should do nicely."

"No," interjected Sev. His voice was quiet, but forceful.

Malfoy frowned. "Why not?" Sev was satisfied to hear from his tone that he automatically assumed that Snape's objection would be logical, not ethical - not that any wizard of Malfoy's views would be able to comprehend the idea of ethical problems with harming mudbloods.

"If this is the prelude to a big gesture, it'll be noted and followed up on. You can't use Potter's girlfriend _because_ she's Potter's girlfriend. It brings the focus too close to us."

Malfoy stuck his lip out petulantly, for a moment showing the spoiled rich boy denied a treat. The moment of childishness was quickly overtaken by cruel intelligence, and he shrugged with fake-indifference. "Who, then? A random target? Well then, pick a house, pick a year."

"Ravenclaw," said Avery.

"Fifth year," said Crabbe.

They looked to Snape, who contemplate for a moment. "Jerrod Daniels, or Erica Swift."

Malfoy gave him a sharp look. "You have the details of every student here in your head?"

Sev simply shrugged. Of course he did. If he heard it, he remembered it. It was hard for him to comprehend that other people's brains didn't work like that.

"Swift it is," said Malfoy with a shrug. Sev suspected he'd chosen to go after the girl out of spite over Snape denying him Lily. Malfoy had come to hate her quite violently in the course of their shared classes; not only was she a mudblood, a girl, and very fond of James Potter, but she consistently beat him in exams. Malfoy bore even Sev's superior brain-power with very poor grace - he certainly wouldn't tolerate it from somebody he considered pretty much sub-human.

Like many of the students from Muggle families, Erica Swift was perhaps a little more conscientious with her studies. Lucius's much-reviled 'mudbloods' were seldom any different from their classmates in their ability to cast spells - but they tended to worry much more about how they were doing. Sev happened to know that Erica and her friends would always be in the library at certain times, and that they always sat at the same table.

Malfoy's package turned out to contain numerous packets of a reddish-brown powder, almost the colour of dried blood. "What does that do?" Avery wanted to know.

"You'll see," smirked Malfoy, liberally sprinkling it over the seats around the table Snape had shown him.

Colin Crabbe's eyes went wide. "Lucius! What if somebody else sits there?" he gasped.

Malfoy grinned, with a glint in his cold grey eyes. "Ah, but that's the beauty of it. Unless they're mudbloods, it _won't do anything_." The others all exclaimed in delight, but Sev's brain was racing. Some kind of property they had discovered that allowed a curse to only work on mudbloods? That was trouble, serious trouble. He suspected from Malfoy's attitude that this gesture of his would be nasty, but not particularly lethal. However, once the curse existed, a sufficiently competent wizard could adapt it.

Sev thought that whoever had supplied the powder to Malfoy had made a tactical error. His 'big gesture' might send the school into a panic, but it would also alert Dumbledore and whoever he might report to; the Ministry would doubtless begin working on a counter to the 'mudblood-only' properties. It was short-sighted.

Of course, the whole Death Eater campaign was being run in a way Sev would never have chosen to. Should he plan for whatever reason to wipe out a group of people, he would do it as randomly and surreptitiously as he had handled Malfoy's schemes at Hogwarts. It was in his nature to act silently, from the shadows; apparently the same did not hold true for this Voldemort character.

Everything in the Death Eaters' agenda so far spoke of a reign of terror. The skull marks, the messages left at the scenes of crimes... the killings were not just killings, but attempts to stir up fear, mistrust, and panic. Sev strongly suspected that Voldemort was not just planning a series of terrorist attacks, but an actual campaign to set himself up as the new ruler of the wizard world. He wanted it to be so that the mere mention of names or glimpse of symbols sent wizards everywhere scurrying for cover.

And without a strong and centralised opposition, he would probably succeed. Sev, with his keen sense for people-watching, knew that the vast majority of people were nervous and afraid of change. For every wise Dumbledore or reckless James Potter, there were a hundred cowering Peter Pettigrews.

Sev did wonder to himself why he had ended up working for the opposing team. He was, after all, hardly the type to get high and mighty about right and wrong and nobility.

The best explanation he could give was that the Death Eaters' attitudes... offended his sense of logic. It was... a stupid way to do things. Inefficient. He was hardly enamoured of the Ministry's slightly wishy-washy desire to please everybody, but at least they weren't trying to skew perceptions or alter the order of things. How were you supposed to do anything if people were judged on basic labels instead of abilities? Under Malfoy's system, you worked with the premise that Crabbe was superior to Lily, and whichever angle you looked at that from, it was still insane.

For whatever reason he might have manoeuvred himself into this position, he was here now; and logic told him to stay. Cuero et al might work to get on the inside, but none of them would ever have the chance at it that he had.

So whilst the boys hung on eagerly for Erica Swift to walk into their little trap, Sev waited with them. He didn't have to pull any over-the-top expression of glee; his companions knew that his face was seldom anything but impassive. They just assumed he was feeling the same underneath.

That, Sev had discovered quickly, was the key to infiltrating any group like the Death Eaters. They automatically assumed that you _would_ think the same as them.

In fact, as they waited, Malfoy managed to prove exactly that. "I've got a plan," he confided. "For how to get it out to the rest of the school. There's no way we can do it; we're just students. But Professor Cuero-"

"I don't trust him," Sev replied automatically. Naturally, he couldn't explain _why_ Malfoy shouldn't go to Cuero. Though technically he was on the side of the Auror spy, now was not the time to go after Malfoy. He was still too unimportant.

"Sev, you don't trust anybody," Malfoy chided with a sharp look. "I've been watching Cuero; I think he's sympathetic to the cause."

"And if you're wrong?" he asked pointedly.

Malfoy's eyes narrowed. "I'm not a fool, Sev. I'll contact him anonymously. And we'll just see what he does about it."

_Dumb._ Cuero was an Auror, he had strong magic at his fingertips. Nothing Malfoy could do to stay anonymous would be unbreakable. But he couldn't reveal that knowledge without awkward questions about why he'd sat on it until now. So he said "I'm going to check him out; see what I can find out about him."

Malfoy shrugged. "Yes, you can do that." With those words, he could be satisfied that he'd changed a challenge to his authority into him giving permission to an underling. "Now stop fussing; the show's starting."

Erica and her friends came along to their usual table and sat down. They glanced across at the pack of Slytherin boys, but paid little attention to them; older students hardly ever noticed the younger, and Sev at least was a familiar sight in the school library.

At first nothing seemed to happen. Colin and Avery shifted uncomfortably in their seats; neither of them had much patience. Simon stared blankly in the general direction of the Ravenclaw table, but it was difficult to tell if he was watching or just lost inside his own head.

Sev and Malfoy were the first to notice when it started; Malfoy knew what he was looking for, and Sev was quick to pick up even tiny changes. Even Erica herself was probably unaware of it. Her hand holding the quill was beginning to shake - just judder slightly, as if she was chilled. The minor shudder rapidly spread, until her entire body was quaking.

"Erica! Are you-?" One of the boys beside her, Jed Aloysius, made a grab for her as she suddenly slid from her chair.

She hit the floor, convulsing violently now. There was a chorus of alarmed cries from her table-mates, and the rest of the students in the library came running. They crowded around to see what was going on - and who would notice if the five Slytherin boys alongside them were perhaps looking a little less surprised and much less distressed?

"She's having a fit!"

"Is she epileptic?"

"Did she just eat something?"

Nobody seemed to have a clue what to do. "Somebody get Madame Florence!" ordered Jed, kneeling beside her and pushing his bookbag under her head. "Erica! Come on girl, are you okay?" She didn't seem to be hearing him; her eyes were rolled back in her head so you could see the whites, and her skin had gone deathly pale.

Nobody moved to do Jed's bidding, and Malfoy gave Avery a shove. "You go!" he ordered, and Sev gave him a subtle nod of acknowledgement as Avery looked surprised but sped off. Jed and his friends, should they remember the Slytherin third years having been there, would also recall that one of them had a been the first to run for help. Malfoy might not be in Snape's class of genius, but he knew all about covering his tracks. He was just about able to get away with murder - a phrase, Sev suspected, which would soon, the way Malfoy was going, be less than metaphorical.

Though Sev was no expert, he didn't think that was the case here. The sustained fit looked pretty scary, but Erica didn't seem to be having trouble breathing and the convulsions weren't getting worse. He nudged Malfoy. "How long?"

Malfoy obviously knew what he was asking. "About an hour." He risked a quick smirk, feeling secure in the assumption that everyone was watching Erica. "Good, isn't it?" he murmured quietly. Malfoy was sharp, but he was also arrogant; that would likely be his downfall.

Perhaps sooner, rather than later. As Madame Florence shooed away the crowd and quickly levitated Erica to take her to the infirmary, he pulled his gang aside and told them "I've sent a anonymous note to Cuero, asking him to meet us in the Forbidden Forest at midnight. As a teacher, he has access to the Great Hall; he can get all the tables dusted with this stuff on the sly." He tapped the parcel containing the rest of the blood-red powder, and smirked. "Can you imagine the scene? We all sit down to dinner, same as usual. Then, all at once... every last damn mudblood in the room - just like Erica. I can see the panic now. We'll raise the Dark Mark over the school, and send them all a message - the day of the mudbloods is _over_."

"I still say you shouldn't trust Cuero," Sev warned him. Malfoy quirked an eyebrow.

"And when you can give me a reason for that, I'll listen." It suited his view of the universe to assume that he was being bold and confident whilst others were jumping at shadows.

Sev merely nodded lightly, and fixed him with a strong gaze. "Then I'll find one."

* * *

Of course, he didn't truly need to find a reason why Malfoy shouldn't trust Cuero; he had one already. The question was, what to do about giving it to him. He couldn't allow this group of novice Death Eaters to be caught out over what was, to be honest, little more than a very vicious and mean-spirited prank.

Cuero was a spy, but few people thought like Sev did. Despite the fact that none of the mudblood students would be permanently damaged by Malfoy's curse, if he knew about it he would feel compelled to stop it. And that would destroy any chance Sev had of following Malfoy to the centre of this web of conspiracy.

There were two ways he could handle this. He could spill Cuero's secret to Malfoy - or he could take the disguised Auror into his confidence.

Going to Cuero was technically the 'right' way - but he didn't like it. Cuero was a variable he had no control over. Lily and Josh Matthews already knew the truth about his association with Malfoy - and that was two people too many. An Auror was, ironically, a much worse person to entrust such a secret to; the chances of him being captured and tortured or simply fed Veritaseum were far higher.

Severus Snape lived by pragmatism and logic. There were two ways to resolve this; regardless of which choice might be 'right' or 'wrong', one greatly increased the chance that his mission would fail, and the other if anything decreased it.

He went to Malfoy.

* * *

"A spy?" Malfoy looked startled for a moment, then thoughtful. "Yes. Yes, that would make sense. That would make a lot of sense..." He turned a sharp look on Severus. "How did you find out?"

"I have my methods," he said inscrutably. He'd rather not let Malfoy know that he could brew a potion like Trustasiem - the Slytherin leader could think of entirely too many nasty ways to use it.

For a instant Malfoy looked angry - and then the expression cleared, so quickly that anybody else but Severus Snape would probably have missed it. "Yes, I do believe you do," he said with a jovial smile. He might dislike being kept out of the loop, but he was smart enough to know that Sev was invaluable to him. He had very nearly blundered directly into a tailor-made trap, and without Snape to point it out to him, he would have done so.

"What do you intend to do about Cuero?" he asked neutrally. It was too much to expect that Malfoy would be smart and leave well enough alone. His pride had been hurt the moment Cuero fooled him, and that he would never put up with.

Malfoy smiled enigmatically, enjoying having secrets of his own to keep. "Oh, don't worry about him. I'll make sure... certain interested parties find out about his loyalties." He frowned for a moment. "I suppose this means my... demonstration will have to wait for a better time; but ah, I doubt my associates will be displeased." He smiled darkly, and clapped Sev on the shoulder. "You've done me a service here today, Severus. And don't worry, it _will_ be rewarded.

He had further cemented his own cover, at the expense of destroying another's. Logic told him that he was in the better position anyway, and that it was the intelligent thing to do.

Sev knew that he was right, but he was beginning to wonder if, when the time came, anybody else would be willing to believe that.

* * *

That night, Sev played on a hunch, and after the others dropped off he didn't get up as usual, but pretended to fall asleep. Sure enough, after a few moments the 'sleeping' Lucius Malfoy stirred in his bed and got out of it. Sev stayed facing the wall, with his eyes shut, until he heard him leave the room.

Slipping silently out of bed, he padded after Malfoy down the corridors. His spell to make him unnoticeable would only work if he was keeping still, and he had no invisibility cloak. Getting caught now would ruin everything; he stayed a long way back.

When Malfoy left via a side door and went out into the grounds, Sev didn't follow but instead retired to a window from which he could watch. He was almost amused to see the 'safe' location in which he had chosen to have a secret meeting; beneath the flailing branches of the Whomping Willow. Had it been a full moon night, he and his companion wouldn't have had nearly as much privacy as they expected.

Both Malfoy and whoever he was meeting with wore hoods pulled down over their faces. Malfoy's was not as good a disguise as he probably thought; Sev would have known him by his height and the arrogant swagger with which he walked. His companion was far more subtle, walking over to meet him with a calculated casualness which meant he probably wouldn't have been looked at twice, even hiding beneath the hood as he was. Malfoy's body language, on the other hand, practically screamed '_up to no good!_'.

Sev was too far away to catch the conversation, but he could read the flow of it in Malfoy's expansive gestures as he talked. The other figure didn't seem to speak or move at all, just listened to him explain. He obviously wasn't aware of Sev watching, but he was prepared to take no chances nonetheless.

Even Sev's powers of observation could not quite identify the figure from so little data, but he quickly narrowed down his pool of suspects. This had to be the hidden Death Eater Cuero had been sent here to discover. That meant one of the staff, an observation Sev felt confident in. A seventh year might have been tall enough, but they moved completely differently to all but the most athletic of adults.

From the general height and shape of the figure compared to Malfoy, Sev could think of four teachers it might be; Professors Vitae, Fractalis, Malachite or Ephemeria. He resolved to sift through every memory he had of their actions for possible clues - but not right now. Malfoy was coming back, and he had to move quickly to get back in bed and be 'asleep' before he returned.

Professor Cuero failed to make it to Care of Magical Creatures that Thursday afternoon. Nor was he there the following week, or for the remaining five weeks of the summer term. Sev had a very strong suspicion that the Ministry of Magic would be receiving no further secret reports from him.

Cuero was dead. Sev was still in with Malfoy. And if he wasn't to find himself having made a wrong choice, he was going to have to make damn sure his mission yielded results.

**End**


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